


quien mal anda, mal acaba

by magnification



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Confessions, Established Relationship, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-19
Updated: 2014-07-19
Packaged: 2018-02-09 11:50:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,333
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1981908
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/magnification/pseuds/magnification
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>By the time Reiner tells him the truth, it is too late for Armin to fall out of love.</p>
            </blockquote>





	quien mal anda, mal acaba

**Author's Note:**

> from a prompt meme thing on tumblr

He says he needs to tell you something, and he needs to tell you now before he loses the will to do it.

You’ve never seen him…wracked like this. He sits on the edge of the cot the two of you have covertly been sharing ever since joining the Survey Corps, his face buried in his massive, rough palms. One foot bounces against the floor, sending him, the cot, and you shaking.

“Reiner, you can tell me anything,” you say.

The sigh he takes is a sigh that is pushing back against tears. Guilt. It takes little to deduce it.

“Armin,” he says, “look, okay, let’s say…let’s say you know something. You’re one of only a few people in the world who knows that thing, and you’re one of only…even fewer people who can actually do something about it.”

It’s best just to listen. It’s always been best to just listen; Reiner himself has taught you this. Even before the two of you were together, you watched him listen, watched him let the other recruits vent their fear, their homesickness, their frustration to him, and he’d offer little in the way of words, but plenty as far as offering them a person to talk to went. You loved that about him. Everyone loved that about him, which is probably why it took you so long to realize you loved all of him. But you do for him as he would do for you: you listen.

“All right,” you say.

“Okay,” he says. “So you know something that is going to save a lot—a lot, Armin—a lot of lives. This is huge. You can actually do something about it, too, is what I mean—you literally have it in you to be able to go out, do what you have to do, and make that thing happen. You can save everyone.”

When he looks at you, brass-colored eyes shining wet, you reach up and place your hand on his cheek. He nestles into it with a look on his face as if it’s the hardest thing he’s ever done.

You don’t want to think you know what he’s talking about. You lift yourself up on one knee, kiss his lips, hold him, shut yourself up. He leans into you, forehead to forehead.

“The thing is,” he continues, “in order to save so many people, you have to be…Armin, I can’t do this.”

“Yes you can, Reiner.”

“I don’t know a word for how—evil, you have to be completely, just, utterly, totally evil, you have to be a monster first. I can’t, Armin.”

“You’re already doing it.”

“God.”

Your hand creeps into his hair. You stroke the short, spiky strands at the back of his skull. Days earlier the Female Titan’s thumb pressed down in that same spot, and you thought he was gone, but then the eruption of blood from her fist was her own tissue, and he spun out and scooped you up and he was yours again, whole, a warm, live body cradling your own. “Keep going,” you tell him, because you don’t think you want him to think that last thing you said was a slight.

He shakes his head, friction burning your palm when his hair scrapes across it. “Armin—look—okay, I know how you feel about—about having to—make sacrifices. I know you would have made the same decision Commander Smith did the other day. I know you can understand that part.

“But—it’s like this. Imagine you have to do that. You make that call, only instead of a hundred or a couple hundred troops, you know, people who have signed up as soldiers and know that they can die at any time, instead of leading them to their deaths at the hand of something out of your control, you—you, yourself, personally—sacrifice thousands of innocent people. You kill them.

“And then you lie about it. You lie, and you lie, and you keep lying, and the only people you don’t lie to are liars themselves, and you lie to people you love, to their faces, and people keep dying because of you.

“Nobody knows. You’re the only person who knows. You’re getting off scot-free. Nobody will ever arrest you, or kill you in return for it, because they don’t know, and even if they found out, they wouldn’t be able to.

“But you lie and you kill and you have no idea how long you’re going to have to keep lying and killing in order to save everyone, and you’re pretty sure that even when you do finish your mission and the world is the way it should be, you won’t have anywhere to go. You won’t get to see the—this world you saved, because you lied to everyone you loved and they’ll know it by then. You’re not doing this so people will think of you as, like, a hero, or something, because nobody’s going to think you’re a hero, anywhere, and you’ve known that from the start.”

You’re holding him tighter than you ever have, clinging so tightly that your hands are going clammy with the fabric of his shirt in your fists. In the same moment that you think to murmur I love you to him just to calm him down, you’re thinking back to the first time you saw him. Not the first day of training, when you spied his face in the mass of cadets, bit back that throb in your belly that told you wow, and when he later came up and introduced himself, and you swore his handshake lingered for way too long, because it left your hand so hot.

The real first time, back in Shiganshina, when he was thirteen meters tall, covered in hard plates, and breathed fire.

“Let’s say that’s what you have to do,” he says. “Would you do it?”

You hang on to him. Your hands refuse to let go even as a part of your brain is telling you that you have no business hanging around here, you need to run to Commander Smith as quickly as possible and report this, that all this time the Armored Titan has been right here, that the Armored Titan has been kissing you, that the Armored Titan has been making love to you, that the Armored Titan is sometimes the only person who can make you feel like you aren’t weak or useless, that the Armored Titan has mumbled your name in his sleep and rolled over to squeeze you like you’re the only thing that can reassure him even when he doesn’t know it, that the Armored Titan has told you every day for months that he loves you.

And you think, this Reiner isn’t the liar.

You answer: “I can only imagine that the kind of person who would do that is the kind of person who loves humanity more than he understands it.”

“Armin,” he says, “I’m the—“

You kiss him. That same loud, nosy part of you insists you search for the taste of smoke on his tongue, but you only taste Reiner. Holding him, kissing him, still being in love with him knowing this is making you feel as if your innards are seeping out through your pores, like your whole body is weeping and you don’t have enough to weep. But you can work with this. There are a thousand ways to work with this, and the only way you can choose one is to keep him by your side. You live in a world that rotates on an axis of vice. Being selfish, for once, will reward you.

You rest your forehead against his, just as he did before. When you see your own eyes reflected in his, you know he won’t lie to you anymore; you have become a part of him, the one part of him that matters to him.

“What happened doesn’t change anything,” you say.

**Author's Note:**

> i may very well turn this into a Bigger Thing. famous last words


End file.
